In the modern enterprise, information workers are inundated with electronic information, much of which is unnecessary and undesired. This information overload occurs because sending electronic information, usually through e-mail, has little cost. In general, each individual in the enterprise acts in his or her own interest when presented with a public good or resource, a phenomenon known in economic terms as “the Tragedy of the Commons.” The cumulative effect of each person acting in their individual interest is that the common resource becomes overused and loses value to the community, as is the case of an overgrazed common pasture. Thus, workers see the e-mail system as very low cost way of getting other's attention, regardless of the significance of their communication to others. As a result, most workers receive excessive amounts of e-mail from their coworkers (and from others), informing them of perhaps trivial developments. The attention of an organization's employees is a vital resource that has suffered from overuse due to the essentially unlimited availability of electronic mail. In addition to the problem of commercial spam, many information workers are overwhelmed by the volume of corporate spam: messages from within their own organization.
A system that allows a sender to signal the importance of an e-mail to the recipient is desired. Current systems do not address the Commons problem because the signals that are available (e.g., priority flags) do not impose a cost on the sender, and so the weight of their signal loses impact over time. In other words, the state of being flagged as a priority in current systems also carries little information to the recipient because it imposes no cost on the creator. Filters and intelligent agents have been proposed to deal with email overload but require a high level of user maintenance and cannot take into consideration the psychology of interpersonal relationships.
Resources other than an individual's attention within an organization are allocated by various mechanisms, many of which fail to operate efficiently. Important projects requiring use of a limited resource may wait in line behind low-priority ones because there is often no queuing mechanism other than first-come-first-serve, or based on other management policies. There is a need for a system that instantiates a more effective allocation mechanism based on the objective function of the organization. In short, a system that allows an individual to make demands on organization resources appropriate to his or her estimation of the possible gains for the organization would allow for increased efficiency and progress toward organization goals.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method that allows or forces a sender of a message to reliably indicate the priority level of a message. The intended recipient can use these value-laden signals to then determine how much attention to devote to the message.